the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. For the Mississippi to make such a change was completely natural, but in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled beside the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature. From fresh water gone, its harbor a silt bar, its economy disconnected from inland commerce, New Orleans would turn into new economy disconnected from inlands and New Orleans would turn into New Gomorrah. Moreover, there were so many big industries between the two cities that at night they made the river glow like a worm. Coming in from …show more content…
This was scarcely the first time that an attempt to control the Mississippi had failed. Old River, 1973, was merely the most emblematic place and moment where, in the course of three centuries, failure had occurred. From the beginnings of settlement, failure was the par expectation with respect to the river a fact generally masked by the powerful fabric of ambition that impelled people. If you travel by canoe through the river swamps of Louisiana, you may very well grow uneasy as the sun is going down. You look around for a site a place to sleep, a place to cook. There is no terra firma. The water is from the state of New York, the state of Idaho, the province of Alberta, and everywhere below that frame. Far above Old River are places where the floodplain is more than a hundred miles wide. Spaniards in the sixteenth century came upon it at the wrong time, saw an ocean moving south, and may have been discouraged. Where the delta began, at Old River, the water spread out even more through a palimpsest of bayous and distributary streams in forested paludal basins but this did not dissuade the French. For military and commercial purposes, they wanted a city in such
Mississippi was also managed in New Orleans to limit flooding. This was done through levies that were at first naturally built by the river’s mud flows during floods. Later the levies were built higher and higher to keep the flooding Mississippi into the New Orleans area. But the levies were often ineffective in managing, or led to, more flooding. Kelman explains this when they write “With the development in the Mississippi Valley ongoing and artificial banks confining more runoff inside the channel, the river set new high-water marks” (Pg 702).
In a passage from his book, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, author John M. Barry makes an attempt use different rhetorical techniques to transmit his purpose. While to most, the Mississippi River is only some brown water in the middle of the state of Mississippi, to author John M. Barry, the lower Mississippi is an extremely complex and turbulent river. John M. Barry builds his ethos, uses elevated diction, several forms of figurative language, and different styles of syntax and sentence structure to communicate his fascination with the Mississippi River to a possible audience of students, teachers, and scientists.
A storm such as Katrina undoubtedly ruined homes and lives with its destructive path. Chris Rose touches upon these instances of brokenness to elicit sympathy from his audience. Throughout the novel, mental illness rears its ugly head. Tales such as “Despair” reveal heart-wrenching stories emerging from a cycle of loss. This particular article is concerned with the pull of New Orleans, its whisper in your ear when you’ve departed that drags you home. Not home as a house, because everything physical associated with home has been swept away by the storm and is now gone. Rather, it is concerned with home as a feeling, that concept that there is none other than New Orleans. Even when there is nothing reminiscent of what you once knew, a true New Orleanian will seek a fresh start atop the foundation of rubbish. This is a foreign concept for those not native to New Orleans, and a New Orleanian girl married to a man from Atlanta found her relationship split as a result of flooding waters. She was adamant about staying, and he returned to where he was from. When he came back to New Orleans for her to try and make it work, they shared grim feelings and alcohol, the result of which was the emergence of a pact reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. This couple decided they would kill themselves because they could see no light amongst the garbage and rot, and failure was draining them of any sense of optimism. She realized the fault in this agreement,
Secondly, it is important to discuss the people of the state. According to Wikipedia, the 2010 U.S. census stated, “ Mississippi is an ethnic diverse state with 59% of the residents being White, 37% African American, 0.5% American Indian, 0.9% Asian American and 2% other. With this many ethnic group, the area is filled with cultural activities to promote their ethnic backgrounds. Prior to the 1830s there were many tribes of Indians in Mississippi. However, in the 1830s the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, most of the Indian population was moved to Oklahoma. Now, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians is located in Philadelphia, Mississippi and the surrounding counties”. According to the same census, “Mississippi has the highest proportion of African American in the nation.
Hard Times: 1920 - 1940. (2008, November 20). In Land of Contrast: A History of Southeast
...ective." Louisiana History 53.2 (2012): 133-167. America: History and Life with Full Text. 9 Apr. 2014. Web.
Panfio de Narvaez led the expedition in 1528 to the Mississippi River mouth. Years had passed and Hernando de Soto did something similar, traveling to the north and the western states of Mississippi then migrated to the Mississippi River traveling to the Gulf of Mexico where they begin to experience great interest in Louisiana. In the 17th century, French and French Canadians were in search of the ability to rule and control the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast, also looking for religion and commercial operations. France claimed many states on both sides of the Mississippi river in order to trade wi...
As the economical ups and down took its tolls on the United States it also hit Spoon River hard. With the country going in and...
Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s Creole Soul. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, c2006.
Sacher, John M. "Louisiana." Encyclopedia of the New American Nation. Ed. Paul Finkelman. Vol. 2. Detroit: Charles Scribner 's Sons, 2006. 305-307. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.
The Great Migration was the movement of two million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Midwest, Northeast and West between 1910 and 1940. In 1900, about ninety percent of African Americans resided in formed slave holding states in the South. Beginning in 1910, the African American population increased by nearly twenty percent in Northern states, mostly in the biggest cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Cleveland. African Americans left the rural south because they believed they could escape the discrimination and racial segregation of Jim Crow laws by seeking refuge in the North. Some examples of Jim Crow laws include the segregation of public schools, public places and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants and drinking fountains for whites and blacks (“The History of Jim Crow). In addition, economic depression due to the boll weevil infestation of Southern cotton fields in the late 1910s and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 forced many sharecroppers to look for other emplo...
the Mississippi, remarks, "Apparently, nobody happened to want such a river, nobody needed it, nobody was curious about it; so, for a century and a half, the Mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed. When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and had no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it, or even take any particular notice of it." We are also presented with a chapter from an unpublished work by the writer, detailing the adventures of a southw...
The state Mississippi is known for many different cultures. These cultures consist of Native American Tunica, Natchez, Biloxi and Western Muskogeans also known as the Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes. In 1540, Hernando de Soto became the first European to discover Mississippi. He was looking for gold, pearls and silver. He was the first to document the great river into official reports. He called it the river El Rio de la Florida. Diseases caused a decline in the population. The United States forced the Indian tribes out of their homeland. During 1695, Europeans was interested in Mississippi because they were looking for commodities like deerskin, tobacco and indigo. They competed for coalitions with various tribes, which ended in deadly conflicts often, resulted. The French and Indian War created a treaty ending in 1763 gave minimal control of the region east of the Mississippi to England. Then during the American Revolution, the Spanish gained control of southern Mississippi. Mississippi was organized as a territory of the United States and kept their flag....
By abandoning the set path of handling Natives that the predecessors left him, nevertheless, Jackson was able to satisfy his interest of the west side of the land. Even with the court cases and the moral values that American already head, Jackson forced the Indians to move from their lands. Without a doubt this act was clearly against everything the American’s believed before his presidency. Therefore, Jackson’s change in policy clearly confirms that “the decision of the Jackson administration to remove the Cherokee Indians to lands west of the Mississippi River in the 1830’s was more a change in the policy than a simple reformulation of that national policy.
These movements west of the Mississippi river caused the newly relocated Indians to give up some of th...